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Sunday, 18 June 2017

The Tory outrage over empty properties is sickeningly hypocritical

We've all seen right-wingers howling with outrage at the idea that the empty investment properties of the mega-rich could be temporarily requisitioned in order to house the homeless survivors of the Grenfell tower fire. In fact we've seen them engaging in dishonest emotional manipulation by describing these empty investment properties as "homes" as if the absent billionaire owners actually live there, rather than leave it empty in order to cash in on the price inflation caused by the utterly negligent Tory attitude to the housing sector.The Tories who express outrage at the idea that empty investment properties could be temporarily requisitioned for the public good are clearly demonstrating that they believe that the property rights of absent billionaires are infinitely more important than the suffering of disaster victims.This sick property rights above all attitude would be bad enough in its own right, but then you get to the shocking hypocrisy of these people when it comes to the Tory policy of permanently requisitioning public assets in order to distribute them to their super-rich hedge fund mates (like they did with Royal Mail), private health profiteers (the ongoing NHS carve-up), unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (thousands of publicly owned schools given away, for free to these education profiteers) and even foreign governments (in 2016 the Tory government handed our publicly owned aviation fuel distribution network directly to the governments of Oman and the UAE).It's extremely telling that these people care more about property rights than they do about people, and it's telling that they care more about the temporary inconvenience to (mainly foreign) billionaire property speculators than they do about the permanent Tory theft of infrastructure and services that belong to all of us.

These people have become so indoctrinated by radically right-wing propaganda that they really can't see the shocking hypocrisy of spewing faux outrage about the idea of temporarily requisitioning empty investment properties for the public good, whilst supporting a political party that permanently requisitions our public property in order to distribute (often for free) to whichever of their mates want a slice of it.

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